Increasing emphasis has been placed on diagnosing and evaluating cardiac dysfunction with noninvasive methods. Mitral stenosis has been evaluated for years with standard M-mode echocardiograms, however, the degree of specificity of orifice narrowing has been notoriously poor in tight stenosis. Recent technical advances have resulted in the development of cross-sectional (two dimensional) echocardiographic images which allows direct measurement of the mitral orifice area. This study correlated the latter method before and after mitral commissurotomy with concomitant hemodynamic evaluation of the mitral valve area in patients with mitral stenosis.